{"id":1083269,"date":"2022-03-07T14:30:00","date_gmt":"2022-03-07T11:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=1083269"},"modified":"2022-03-07T14:30:00","modified_gmt":"2022-03-07T11:30:00","slug":"how-todays-electronic-music-is-bringing-age-old-folk-traditions-back-to-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=1083269","title":{"rendered":"How Today\u2019s Electronic Music Is Bringing Age-Old Folk Traditions Back to Life"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
Columns<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

How Today\u2019s Electronic Music Is Bringing Age-Old Folk Traditions Back to Life<\/h1>\n
<\/div>\n
\n
Incorporating everything from Mayan flutes to medieval choirs to ancient Mediterranean pots, contemporary producers are looking to the past to help unlock the present.<\/div>\n
\n
\n
By <\/span>Philip Sherburne<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

\n
\n
<\/p>\n
\n
<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

Graphic by Callum Abbott<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/header>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n

In a recent concert on the small Mediterranean island of Menorca, the Spanish musician Anna Ferrer stood behind a synthesizer and struck up a sumptuous, buzzing drone. Wreathed in smoke and backlit by a single beam of light, she sang a melancholy melody that could make you feel like you\u2019re falling backward through the centuries. In some sense, that\u2019s exactly what those of us seated in the 19th-century opera house were doing.<\/p>\n

Her repertoire that night was drawn mostly from Menorcan folk music\u2014songs of harvest, love, and hardship, songs that the island\u2019s inhabitants have been singing for generations. Titled Paren\u00f2stic<\/em>, a regional term for a farmers\u2019 almanac, the performance conjured vivid images with little more than voice, synth, and guitarr\u00f3n (a stringed instrument native to the Baleares). The stark set took sounds from the past\u2014including, at one point, a distorted loop of an old woman singing that sounded like it came from a weatherbeaten vinyl disc\u2014and made them feel eerily contemporary, collapsing centuries of humanity into spine-tingling harmonies.<\/p>\n

For her finale, Ferrer sang an emotional a cappella version of \u201cCecilia,\u201d a heartbreaking tale of a dying bride. By chance, that song also turns up in the repertoire of Tarta Relena, a Catalan duo responsible for two groundbreaking albums of experimental folk music in the past year: Pack Pro Nobis<\/em> and Fiat Lux<\/em>. Hybridity is at the heart of Tarta Relena\u2019s approach: The duo of Helena Ros and Marta Torrella adapts songs from across Spain and around the Mediterranean, and their material includes flamenco standards, Corsican polyphony, and even the eerie modal harmonies of the Caucasian nation of Georgia. (You might recognize the latter style from Kate Bush\u2019s 1985 song \u201cHello Earth,\u201d from Hounds of Love<\/em>, which includes snippets of the Georgian folk song \u201cTsintskaro.\u201d)<\/p>\n

Yet Tarta Relena\u2019s approach is decidedly contemporary. Pack Pro Nobis<\/em> includes leftfield dance remixes from John Talabot and MANS O, while subtle electronic pulses and rippling effects run through Fiat Lux<\/em>. Onstage, the two musicians flesh out their singing by playing percussive patterns on a ceramic amphora outfitted with a contact mic\u2014a nifty blend of technologies both modern and ancient.<\/p>\n

\n
\n
<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\n
\n
\n
\n

It\u2019s not just folk music: Zoom out, and it becomes clear that a number of centuries-old styles are seeping into experimental electronic music as of late. The Mexican-American musician Debit, aka Delia Beatriz, utilized pipes and flutes to create her new album The Long Count<\/em>: Aided by machine learning, she created digital instruments modeled after ancient Mayan wind instruments held in the collection of the National Autonomous University of Mexico. By turns bleak and otherworldly, her album feels like an attempt to grapple with the fundamental unknowability of the distant past, even as it seeks to forge a spiritual connection that transcends contemporary methods of timekeeping\u2014the album\u2019s title is a reference to the Mesoamerican Long Count Calendar, a cyclical calendar charting the creation and destruction of the universe.<\/p>\n

Debit\u2019s remarkable and at times unsettling album is a reminder that folk music isn\u2019t merely a style; it is a means of making sense of the world and forging connections with others, in both celebration and mourning. And in harnessing unfamiliar instruments to ask questions about tradition, heritage, and post-colonial forgetting, her music suggests that certain sounds may unlock emotions we can\u2019t readily decipher, placing us in a lineage far vaster than we might have imagined.<\/p>\n

\n
\n
<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/figure>\n

Polish composer Wojciech Rusin\u2019s spellbinding Syphon<\/em>, newly released on cutting-edge electronic label AD 93, taps into digitally processed reeds, 3D printed instruments, and a cappella singing for what he describes as a \u201cspeculative\u201d approach to medieval and renaissance traditions, performed in an imagined future in which the past is recalled only in fragments. In the opening \u201cSpeculum Veritatis\u201d\u2014an invocation of the Mirror of Truth, a 17th century alchemical symbol\u2014Wojciech seems to be enacting his own kind of musical alchemy: Featured vocalist Eden Girma\u2019s mournful singing recalls the poise of early-music choirs like the Hilliard Ensemble or Gothic Voices. But as the song develops, ominous synthesizers rise from below, and Girma\u2019s voice turns dissonant and guttural against rippling percussion. Similar transformations take place across the stretch of the album, as sheets of digital noise alternate with baroque harpsichord, nature recordings, and processed bagpipes.<\/p>\n

\n
\n
<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/figure>\n

In some cases, \u201cfolk\u201d is a feeling. There\u2019s a distinctly timeworn air to the Polish composer Piotr Kurek\u2019s new album World Speaks<\/em>. Inspired by the Hudson River School painter Thomas Cole, whose 19th century landscapes were imbued with classical and Biblical symbolism, Kurek layers reeds, organ, and voice\u2014or samples of these acoustic sources, anyway\u2014into surreal, moir\u00e9-like patterns. There\u2019s a hint of Georgian polyphony to the baritone hum of the opening \u201cChordists,\u201d while the tentative pipes of \u201cMontufar\u201d evoke medieval folk dances under the influence of magic mushrooms and strong mead. It feels like a time machine that is hurtling forward and backward at once.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\n
\n
\n
\n

Ancient agonies also resonate in Community of Grieving<\/em>, a sorrowful composition by the Polish sound artist Zosia Ho\u0142ubowska and Stockholm composer Julia Giertz, in which harrowing vocal harmonies and otherworldly ululations dissolve into thick sheets of digitally treated drones, techno rhythms, and ASMR-inspired breathing. They wrote the 24-minute piece for the the online-only 2020 edition of Krakow\u2019s Unsound Festival, when the pandemic\u2019s brutal first wave was sowing fear and confusion around the world. The piece is meant to balance rituals of mourning with the comforts of community\u2014even when that togetherness is purely notional, as it was for so many during COVID\u2019s lockdown phase. Community of Grieving<\/em>\u2019s thrillingly dissonant vocals remind me of a moment in the 1980s when Eastern European folk music was briefly in vogue\u2014Georgia\u2019s Rustavi Choir put out an album on Nonesuch in 1989, and a 1975 album by les Myst\u00e8re des Voix Bulgares became a surprise hit when the goth-adjacent 4AD reissued it in 1986\u2014but perhaps an even more germane comparison would be Diamanda Gal\u00e1s\u2019 1991 album Plague Mass<\/em>, which envisioned the miseries of the AIDS crisis through an experimental fusion of opera, fado, and gospel.<\/p>\n

\n
\n
<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/figure>\n

A few weeks after seeing Anna Ferrer in concert, I was browsing a local artisan market when I heard a familiar melody wafting across the plaza. \u201cAd\u00e9u ma Cec\u00edlia\u2026 Ad\u00e9u ma Cec\u00edlia<\/em>\u201d\u2014it was the same folk song with which Ferrer had so movingly ended her concert, the same one that gives me goosebumps every time I hear it on Tarta Relena\u2019s album. Only this time, it was being sung by a decidedly amateur group of local folk singers, their harmonies rough around the edges. In the plaza, the song was clearly alive<\/em>, in the way of all truly timeless music\u2014shuttling between avant-garde contexts and popular celebrations, a link to the past that refused to be stuck there.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n

Source URL: https:\/\/pitchfork.com\/thepitch\/how-todays-electronic-music-is-bringing-age-old-folk-traditions-back-to-life\/<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Columns How Today\u2019s Electronic Music Is Bringing Age-Old Folk Traditions Back to Life Incorporating everything from Mayan flutes to medieval choirs to ancient Mediterranean pots, contemporary producers are looking to the past to help unlock the present. By Philip Sherburne March 7, 2022 Graphic by Callum Abbott In a recent concert on the small Mediterranean […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1083270,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[54],"class_list":["post-1083269","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics","tag-pitchfork-com"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1083269","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1083269"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1083269\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1083270"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1083269"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1083269"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1083269"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}